Thursday, March 03, 2005

Interview with Kathleen Sullivan (Part Two)

Here's a little bit more from my interview with Kathleen Sullivan, recovering survivor of ritual abuse and mind control. The first part can be read here. I'll have more from Kathleen in a later post.

(And by the way, check out Wayne Madsen's post today entitled "GOP pedophilia and S&M trysts: A long history going back to Bush 41 and Reagan." He releases documents and correspondence pertaining to a military child pornography ring he had investigated in 1984 while a naval lieutenant. Madsen writes: "One note of interest: the 'X' in the Case Control Number 718XNA refers to the FBI's cross referencing file numbering system. The 'X' means that the case is a 'X' case–meaning that the case is of extreme sensitivity, the 'NA' following the 'X' refers to the Navy. There are, in fact, 'X Files,' but they have nothing to do with aliens but very much to do with high-level government officials engaged in off-the-wall activities, like pedophilia and prostitution.")

Could you share a little about how you initially connected with other survivors? And what was that experience like, hearing others for the first time tell stories of shockingly similar abuse?

I first began to connect with survivors of criminal occult ritual abuse in the summer of 1990, when I first entered a specialized hospital unit for severely dissociated trauma survivors. I entered that unit because although I hadn’t yet been diagnosed with a dissociative disorder, I was having awful, gory repetitive flashbacks that appeared to indicate that I might be a criminal occult ritual abuse survivor. I still was in denial of that possibility, however, because it meant having to accept that my father had also taken on the role of a high priest who did terrible things to me and other innocents in covert rituals.

Being in the presence of the other RA (ritual abuse) survivors at that hospital unit helped me to understand that I was not the only person this had been done to. It was, to a limited extent, my first "normalizing" experience. Although we were not allowed to tell each other our horror stories (I am grateful for that), I was able to recognize that the psychological effects of what they had endured were very similar to my own. I kept trying to go back into denial, though, and wanted to get away from the unit. It was too much reality for me. I didn’t want to believe that I was one of them, and I certainly didn’t like learning that I had MPD. When I returned home, I deliberately did not keep contact with any of the fellow patients who had been at that unit.

The next summer, I was in crisis (as usual: major depression, flashbacks, suicidal ideations) and checked into a different hospital unit in a different state. Although the personnel in this unit also worked with severely dissociated trauma survivors – particularly survivors of criminal occult ritual abuse – they were also open to the reality that other types of trauma could also create dissociation and other related symptoms in clients. As much as possible, I kept to myself. I had always been a loner and had no intention of changing. After several weeks, a new male patient checked into the unit. He couldn’t remember how he ended up there. One of my alter-states immediately recognized him, and knew that I had done covert ops with him in the past. He also recognized me. This is when the government memories first began to emerge. I didn’t understand how I could have been involved in covert operations, but the memories were vivid and clear, and I felt a very close, non-sexual connection with that man. He seemed to feel the same towards me. (Such feelings are not uncommon between former ops partners). He left the hospital unit just as unexpectedly as he’d arrived; his older brother checked him out. Although I have not seen him since then, being around him helped me to begin to remember, explore, and talk about that more hidden part of my life. I also met a female who remembered having done ops with me. Although I didn’t remember her, we did compare – through a staff member – certain memories of buildings and a certain perpetrator that seemed identical. She didn’t like me, and because she felt threatened by my presence, I stayed clear of her. We met again at a similar hospital unit a year later, and were able – with therapeutic help – to sit in a room and not want to attack each other. We were able to acknowledge that we had equally been victims in the past.

At home, I remembered the government activities for several more years before I joined an Internet deprogramming support group. As I communicated with the other members of that group, I was very careful to focus only on my own personal work. The other members helped me to feel halfway human for the first time in my life. With their encouragement, I realized that I might be able to deprogram all the way and even live a "normal" life someday. In that group, we did not focus on memories. Instead, we focused on what had been done to our minds to make us compliant towards the perpetrators who chose to control our minds and use us for illegal activities.

After several more years of recovery work, I sensed that I had remembered enough, and integrated enough, to know what I had experienced, and who had done what to me. At that point, I sensed that if I read other survivors’ stories, I would not take in details of their histories and adopt them as my own. I may never get to the point, however, where I am not bothered by other survivors’ stories. Part of my problem is that I’ve recovered enough of my own self and past to recognize the validity of many of their stories. I often get emotional as I realize that – here is another person who has been through pure hell, and has survived to tell someone about it. I am amazed at how so many of these individuals have been able to survive all that was done to them. To me, every one of them is a human miracle.

999 Comments:

Thanks for your posts lately. Ive enjoyed the story so far.I pause however any time an adult woman with recovered memories involving her father(high priest).Here is a little more on the subject,http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/39/features-abramsky.php thanks.

Alien abduction memories seem dodgy. Could it be they are trickled in mass consciousness(or targeted towards indivduals) by technological means, so as to discredit ritual sex abuse? same as with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: if you point at the financing elite, you befriend antisemites and are assimilated with them.

A woman was arrested for disruption of Congress on Tuesday afternoon after she stood up in the Senate visitors gallery and began shouting wildly about child pornography during debate over the bankruptcy bill.

At a few minutes before 5 p.m., when Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) were debating an amendment, the woman rose and shouted, “You don’t know who’s a pedophile,” according to a Democratic staffer whose office abuts the chamber.

“You don’t know who has a child pornography site,” she continued. As police were removing her from the chamber, she began shouting names. “George Bush, John Kerry, McCain from Arizona — those are the sites you should check.”

The woman, who appeared to be roughly in her 50s or 60s, continued to scream, kick and resist for some time as she was removed to a hallway and handcuffed. A Senate employee who works in the gallery said the woman “had been in there all day and I think even yesterday.”

Capitol Police did not release the woman’s name. Disruption of Congress is a misdemeanor offense.

Elena Sassower, a New York activist, was sentenced last year to six months in jail for disrupting a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing after she refused to apologize publicly.

"We know that the brain stores traumatic memories differently to regular memories. Notions of 'false memory' have no clinical or neurological basis.

Time to turn the tables on the disbelievers. Let's start talking about 'cognitive dissonance' - where people reject the facts because it contradicts their worldview."

Bollocks. I'll be happy to look at the "facts" when some are presented to me. Rumor, innuendo and wild speculation are not facts. There very well may be some facts associated with "ritual abuse" but I have yet to see any of them. Credulity is not a revolution.

False Memories Easily Created, Researchers Discover

About one-third of the people who were exposed to a fake print ad describing a visit to Disneyland and how they met and shook hands with Bugs Bunny said later they remembered or knew the event happened to them.

The scenario described in the ad never occurred because Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros. cartoon character and wouldn't be featured in any Walt Disney Co. property, according to University of Washington memory researchers Jacquie Pickrell and Elizabeth Loftus.

Pickrell will make two presentations on the topic at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Society (APS) on Sunday (June 17) in Toronto and at a satellite session of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition in Kingston, Ontario, on Wednesday.

"The frightening thing about this study is that it suggests how easily a false memory can be created," said Pickrell, UW psychology doctoral student.

"It's not only people who go to a therapist who might implant a false memory or those who witness an accident and whose memory can be distorted who can have a false memory. Memory is very vulnerable and malleable. People are not always aware of the choices they make. This study shows the power of subtle association changes on memory."

The research is a follow-up to an unpublished study by Loftus, a UW psychology professor who is being honored by the APS this week with its William James Fellow Award for psychological research; Kathryn Braun, a visiting scholar at the Harvard Business School; and Rhiannon Ellis, a former UW undergraduate who is now a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh.

In the original study, 16 percent of the people exposed to a Disneyland ad featuring Bugs Bunny later thought they had really seen and met the cartoon rabbit.

In the new research, Pickrell and Loftus divided 120 subjects into four groups. The subjects were told they were going to evaluate advertising copy, fill out several questionnaires and answer questions about a trip to Disneyland.

* The first group read a generic Disneyland ad that mentioned no cartoon characters.

* The second group read the same copy and was exposed to a 4-foot-tall cardboard figure of Bugs Bunny that was casually placed in the interview room. No mention was made of Bugs Bunny.

* The fourth, or double exposure group, read the fake ad and also saw the cardboard rabbit.

This time, 30 percent of the people in the Bugs group later said they remembered or knew they had met Bugs Bunny when they visited Disneyland and 40 percent of the people in the double exposure group reported the same thing.

"'Remember' means the people actually recall meeting and shaking hands with Bugs," explained Pickrell. "'Knowing' is they have no real memory, but are sure that it happened, just as they have no memory of having their umbilical cord being cut when they were born but know it happened.

"Creating a false memory is a process. Someone saying, 'I know it could have happened,' is taking the first step of actually creating a memory. If you clearly believe you walked up to Bugs Bunny, you have a memory."

In addition, Pickrell said there is the issue of the consequence of false memories, or the ripple effects. People in the experiment who were exposed to the false advertising were more likely to relate Bugs Bunny to other things at Disneyland not suggested in the ad, such as seeing Bugs and Mickey Mouse together or seeing Bugs in the Main Street Electrical Parade.

"We are interested in how people create their autobiographical references, or memory. Through this process they might be altering their own memories," Pickrell said. "Nostalgic advertising works in a similar manner.

"Hallmark, McDonald's and Disney have very effective nostalgic advertising that can change people's buying habits. You may not have had a great experience the last time you visited Disneyland or McDonald's, but the ads may inadvertently be creating the impression that they had a wonderful time and leaving viewers with that memory. If ads can get people to believe they had an experience they never had, that is pretty powerful.

"The bottom line of our study is that the phony ad is making the difference. Just casually reading a Bugs Bunny cartoon or some other incidental exposure doesn't mean you believe you met Bugs.

As a survivor of very real ritual abuse, I have decided that it is impossible to placate those who demand "proof" that ritual abuse is real. I am in my 40's, and have told very few people about my past. I will never tell anyone else. The pain of being disbelieved is deeper than any injury ever done by past abusers, and only makes one further shy away from the very interaction they so desperately need in order to heal. Some people simply refuse to believe that such evil exists in the world. To those people, I do sincerely hope that you never come face-to-face with the ultimate horror, as I have. I wish that I, too, had no knowledge of it. I would like to ask you, please... don't be cruel in your judgement of others, just because you have no first-hand knowledge of what they have experienced. Finally, my deepest thanks to each person who has kept an open mind about ritual abuse... you give hope to so many. "Do not judge another until you have walked a mile in his moccasins."

Hi, everyone - again, thanks for all of your comments. Two quick responses:

First, there is more than ample proof that criminal occult ritual abuse has been perpetrated by individuals and by groups in the U.S. and beyond. Through the mainstream media, a mountain of disinfo practically buried public awareness of this particularly heinous crime during the past decade. That is especially troubling, because as long as the public chooses to believe the disinfo, sadistic perpetrators are free to continue their crimes. What I find more frightening, is that a number of the alleged perpetrators, after being found guilty, were freed due to testimonies from Dr. Loftus and other professionals directly connected to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (see below).

You can read about documented criminal occult crimes and related issues on our foundation's website at http://naffoundation.org

Second, Elizabeth Loftus is a strongly outspoken member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation's Scientific and Professional Advisory Board. The FMSF appears to have engineered the backlash against outspoken ritual abuse survivors, beginning in the early 1990s. The FMSF is a non-profit agency that was created by several individuals who had been involved in MKULTRA human experimentation. They included Martin Orne (master hypnotist, deceased) and Peter Freyd, the husband of the FMSF's current leader, Pamela Freyd. Further, contrary to her claims, Dr. Loftus did not create a false memory in some of her subjects. Rather, she scrambled subjects' LEGITIMATE memories of having been in a Disney amusement park in the distant past. She scrambled their memories by adding fake memory filler in some of the subjects' memory gaps. Gap filler is a common method used by mind-control perpetrators, to confuse and discredit their victims.

Although Dr. Loftus is not named, the names of some of the FMSF's professional members who were previously involved in the CIA's MKULTRA subprograms can be found on my personal website at http://kathleen-sullivan.com/Government%20Research.htm. This information was taken from Dr. Colin Ross's book, "Bluebird: The Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality By Psychiatrists." Dr. Ross gleaned the information from thousands of documents that he had obtained from the CIA. Other researchers, including author Alex Constantine and author/survivor Carol Rutz, have done the same.

With little more than a cursory reading of the false memory study article posted by Prof. Hex, it seems obvious the "findings" as stated are seriously misrepresented, or, at best, presented with too little information to make them meaningful. It reveals little more than that people have trouble distinguishing between oversized anthropomorphized mice and similarly rendered rabbitsI agree with Kathleen, in that it appears most likely these masters of the mind fuck did no more than "trick" their subjects into distorting very real experiences with strongly suggested false details. Doesn't it seem likely the 30 percent of subjects who "falsified" their memory of hand-shaking sessions with Bugs, quite likely DID visit Disneyland (or some similar amusement park) and DID shake hands with/encounter some oversized cartoon character (quite possibly Mickey Mouse, or Goofy, or whatever)? In other words, the essence of the experience is probably (I'm not given enough info to verify the probability) truthful. The fact they couldn't keep straight the names and corresponding cartoon characters assigned these corporate-conceived playgrounds says a lot about how shallow and interchangeable they truly are. It reveals very little, however, about the reliability of trauma-related memories. Unless, of course, Loftus & Pickrell & Co. are attempting to argue that a few hours at Epcot Center can somehow be manipulated by unscrupulous therapists into false memories of an incestuous rape. The leap, though tempting, is a bit too extreme.

Just wanted to add my two cents in support of Peter and Pam Freyd. I was a colleague of JJF's when she "recovered" her memory of abuse. She breathlessly told me the whole histrionic story. At the time, I was skeptical. Today, I'm almost 100% sure she was not abused. She's a faux feminist and an attentionholic.

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